Discarded Pressure Cooker Sparks North Shore High School Bomb Scare

North Shore High School in Glen Head was evacuated Tuesday morning after a discarded pressure cooker caused a bomb scare, Nassau County police and school officials said.

Emergency Service Unit officers responded to the school on Glen Cove Avenue at 10:13 a.m. and soon after learned that the pressure cooker had simply been discarded by a staffer, a police spokeswoman said. Students and educators were evacuated to a field away from the building as a precaution, a school official said.

“They believe the package is nothing,” Robert Chlebicki, assistant superintendent of North Shore Schools, told the Press before police confirmed that the item was a pressure cooker.

The kitchen appliances have been used to build improvised explosive devices (IEDs) such as those found in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and in New Jersey over the weekend as well as by the Boston Marathon bombers, among others. Ahmad Khan Rahami of Elizabeth, N.J. was arrested in connection with the Chelsea bombing that wounded 29 on Saturday night.

The discovery of suspicious packages routinely sparks a large police response on Long Island.

On Monday night, Suffolk County police Emergency Services officers used a robot to X-ray and unzip a suspicious backpack that a Best Buy employee found unattended at the Bay Shore store, police said. The bag turned out to contain spiral notebooks and was believed to have been left behind by someone loading merchandise into their car, police said.

“It was handled the way all suspicious items are handled—carefully until deemed safe,” a Suffolk police spokeswoman said.

Timothy Bolger is the Editor in Chief of the Long Island Press who’s been working to uncover unreported stories since shortly after it launched in 2003. When he’s not editing, getting hassled by The Man or fielding cold calls to the newsroom, he covers crime, general interest and political news in addition to reporting longer, sometimes investigative features. He won’t be happy until everyone is as pissed off as he is about how screwed up Lawn Guyland is.